Soon to be leaving.

We just had our lasts braai in Namibia – a goodbye party for ourselves. We’ve enjoyed having people over often, and the kids had a good time with friends they have met over the year. At one point, 16 kids were in the pool at once!

It’s hard to believe that our 13 months adventure in southern Africa is almost over. We’ve been very busy packing up our five suitcases (and weighing them repeatedly to see how far over the weight limit we are), giving away things we have accumulated over the year, and saying good-bye to all the fun and interesting people we’ve met over the year.

In our last month in Namibia, we went on three special last trips. First, we went with our friends, fellow Fulbrighters who are marine biologists who stayed mostly on the coast, on a camping trip to Etosha. While the animals weren’t at the Okakuejo waterhole like they had been the previous 3 times we’d been there, we did see lots of animals on our drives – a pride of lions, elephants, zebra, giraffe, all the antelopes, etc. It’s . One of the best parts was a treasure hunt that our friend made as a Christmas surprise for all the girls, which took them all over the Halali Safari Resort!



We had Christmas morning at our house in Namibia, and then left for our last long trip – a trip to the South. We first went to Soususvlei, the red sand dunes, where we camped in the beautiful Seserim campsite. On our Christmas drive over the mountain pass, we drove 200 kilometers without seeing a single car come the other way! The red sand dunes are an amazing site, and we enjoyed hiking up them dunes, and running down them.



We then drove south, stopping by the Duswib castle, a bizarre German castle that is way in the middle of nowhere. We then continued on what we all agreed was one of the most stunning drives we have taken in Namibia. We were on a D road (the Namibian roads are classified as B for tarred roads, C for good gravel roads, and D for not so good gravel roads, and F for farm roads – I’m not sure what A would be, but there isn’t one in the whole country) that is as far west as you can go in that part of the country. On the west side of the road were the red dunes with some green plants and white rocks, and on the east side were black jagged mountains. We saw lots of game, mostly gemsbok and springbok, both which are marvelously adapted for living in the desert. We camped at a really, really remote campsite, which still had solar powered hot water, even if it had no electricity.

Next we went to Luderitz, the southernmost coast town that you can get to without a diamond mine permit. This is a town that is set on the rocks, and the landscape is all grey and rocky, with no soil at all! It was a German settlement at one point, and has a nice harbor, which is unfortunately too shallow to be used too much anymore. As a surprise to Maxine for her birthday, we booked the Ludertiz Lighthouse to stay in there. This was a very cool place to stay, and we enjoyed sitting outside on the crows’ nest where we had a view of the whole town and the harbors and oceans. While we were in Luderitz, we went to the nearby Kolmanskop ghost town, a diamond mining town that was very fancy in the early 20th century, but has been deserted since the 1950s. The sand dunes have since marched through the town, and have filled up many of the houses. In true Namibian fashion, the entire town was open for exploration. We were told that we might not want to go in a few buildings because they are soon to collapse, but it’s your choice.

Luderitz was a great place for beach combing on the rocky parts of the beach, and . Our marine biologist friends sent us on a mission to look for a new sea worm they discovered, so we thoroughly enjoyed spending the day collecting and analyzing mussel l shells. On Maxine’s birthday, we took a four hour sailboat trip in the Luderitz Harbor, where we were able to see the African penguins up close and the dolphins swam by the boat for almost two hours. It was magical.

Next – to the Fish River Canyon, the second largest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon. We had a little misfortunate on the way there though, as once we were on the D road, I had stopped to take photo and turned the car off. When I went back in the car, I found out that the fancy security system that we had in the car had stopped working. We were miles from anywhere, so all we could do was to try to disconnect the security system and wait for another car. We couldn’t figure out the electrical system and no cars came, so we were considering camping on the side of the road as it was 5 pm. In Namibia, you have to BE PREPARED, as there’s often no one around at all. After an hour and a half, finally another car came, and it turned out to be a South African electrician on safari with his wife. So this very generous guy towed us for kilometers to the campsite, and then completely rewired the security system. We camped with this nice, interesting couple that night, which was an excellent way to spend New Years Eve.

The Fish River Canyon was spectacular, and we also loved where we camped the next night – the Quiver Tree Forest, near the Giant’s Playground. We also stopped by a very funky community based tourism site near some other quiver trees, which had 100s of little sculptures. Admission was 10 cents per person.

As we were driving back from this trip, we went over our year in Namibia and realized that we had made 19 trips while here, so it was just perfect that we were going for one more short trip to a brand new Game Lodge only a few hours a way called Erindi. Unlike most of our 19 trips were we camped and cooked over the fire, Erindi was an all-inclusive place where we got two all meals, drinks, and two game drives thrown in. Erindi is an old cattle farm that is 200,000 acres, which is about 300 square miles. On our game drives, our primary activity was leopard tracking, as they had some leopards with collars on them for a woman who is staying there dong leopard research. We had a lot of fun off-road tracking of the leopard, driving at night through riverbeds with a tracker sitting on top of the land rover and using spotlights. We had some beautiful and fun drives, but never did find the elusive leopard. We did see a pride of lion up very close, a white rhino, a large family of giraffe, and many other animals. This was an excellent last trip in Namibia.

So, in a year, we went on 20 trips together as a family, and put on more than 45,000 kilometers on the combi. What a great year!

Letter in the Namibian

The Namibian has been our very favorite newspaper here, and we buy it from the guy standing on the corner every Monday through Friday for N$3 (about 30 cents). The Namibian has been around since before independence, and is a surprisingly in-depth, and balanced newspaper. It's motto is, "still telling it like it is." It is an English language paper, but it has several pages each day in Oshiwambo. There also is a government run English paper that also has sections in indigineous languages (the New Era), an Afrikaans paper (Republikein), a German paper, some free weeklies and some other local papers. One of the neat features of the Namibian is that they have a whole page every day dedicated to SMSs from readers. I think it's a great way to publish a lot of opinions daily (40 to 50 per day), and you really get a pulse of the nation reading these. Plus, most people communicate via SMS here - much more than actually talking on the phone and infinitely more than email or letter writing. I think US papers will need to copy this SMS idea in its papers.

While I am a fan of the SMSs, I was pleased to get a real letter to the editor (not an SMS) published today about my social work department at Unam in the Namibian. It's all true. Read it here!

Spring Break in the Namib (in October)

During the kids’ Spring Break in October (yes, took awhile to post this), the girls and I went with our good friends on a camping trip to the Namib Desert. The Namib, obviously, is Namibia’s namesake. It is a huge desert west of Windhoek that spreads all the way to the coast. It is famous for its red sand dunes, the white desert, and other stunning landscapes, and has lots of unique plants, many that have yet to be documented. We spent most of our trip in the Namib-Naukluft National Park.


Most of the time all 5 kids rode with me in the combi.

The first day we drove over an absolutely gorgeous pass leaving the Hochland Highlands where Windhoek is (we are at about 5,000 feet in elevation in Windhoek) toward the desert. We stayed in an extremely remote campground/lodge, which felt like it was at the end of the earth. It was about 30 kilometres off the “main road” on an extremely bumpy road, with the main road being a gravel road with nobody on it. The proprietors had been living in the desert along time; the man wore only shorts and nothing else, walking around barefoot on all of the sharp thorns. Our campsite was up in the rocks, and had an amazing view where you could see forever. The kids had a great time exploring the rocks, though I wasn’t too happy when they found a Scorpion. The campground was a lovely place, but the rocks formed sort of a wind tunnel.

In the middle of the night, the wind kept blowing down our tents and it was sort of miserable. At one point, Maxine and Alice got out of their tent, and the wind actually blew their tent away over the side of the cliff!! We all ended up sleeping in the car. The next day a worker brought it back, as she had found it stuck on a game fence a few kilometers away. After we had recovered from our windy night, we stopped by the lodge, and the owners of the place took us to see their pets, an orphan zebra and a donkey (apparently, the zebra and the donkey are “married”). The owner gives the zebra, named Linus, a cup of coffee every morning. The zebra came running down the hill for the coffee, sort of like I do in the morning for my coffee, and drank the coffee from the mug. The kids all got to ride the Linus the Zebra bareback, which was fun.


Off to an auspicious start - flat tire!


Entrance to Rooiklip - another 30 K to go.


Our campsite


Kids at sunset


Linus drinking coffee


Alice riding the zebra bareback

We then headed for our main destination, the Gobabeb Desert Research Centre, which is run by the Desert Research Foundation of Namibia. The road were pretty desolate on the way to Gobabeb, as you need a permit to enter this fragile part of the ecosystem. We saw some Ostrich, Springbok and Gemsbok on the way, and had a few instances where the combi went into sand pits in the road and was covered completely in a cloud of sand. We took a little break in a cool cave, and also drove by the Tropic of Capricorn.


Cave





Tropic of Capricorn

We were able to get permits and an invitation to visit because we were on the Fulbright programme, and because the person we were talking to was a student from Grinnell College who grew up in Minnesota! Gobabeb is almost 100% off-grid, making use of the almost universal Namibian sunshine to power itself with solar energy. The interest in solar energy is growing in Namibia, but I am surprised still at the resistance to solar energy here. There couldn’t be a better place for solar energy in the world.


Gobabeb Entrance


Touring the Solar Panels

Gobabeb lies at the intersection of the white gravelly plains type of desert, the red desert, and the dry riverbeds. As far as we could tell, the main research activities were documenting the insects, plants and other wildlife in the area. We were surprised that there weren’t actually more scientists there, as they have a great location and great facilities. While we got a tour of the facilities, the highlight of our stay at Gobabeb was going on a self-guided nature walk through all three landscapes. The kids, of course, preferred climbing the red dunes and running down them!


Kids on the hike


Gobabeb from the Red Dune



Climbing up the Dunes




Girls by the red dunes


The Riverbed

The next day we left Gobabeb, stopped in for refueling in Walvis Bay, and then headed for an area known as the Welwetchisa Plains. Welwitschia are Namibian plants that have only two leaves and lives for more than 1,000 years. It is a desert adapted plant, gaining its moisture solely from the fog that comes off the ocean. This area is quite a barren part of the country, and one part of it is called the “moonscape” as it resembles the moon. We saw the largest known Welwetschia plant there, which is about 4 meters wide and 1 ½ tall. While this region is a protected region that requires permits for entry, all care for the environment goes away when mining is concerned. There is a “uranium rush” occurring in Namibia, where lots of prospectors think they are going to get rich off of uranium. The government allows uranium prospectors to prospect anywhere, so it was very disconcerting to see all of this completely unregulated activity happening in this extremely delicate environment. They founder of he Desert Research Foundation of Namibia is quite upset about this, but is trying to get the Uranium prospectors to try not to ruin the entire desert in their quest for uranium. See this article here if you are interested.


Ruby at the Moonscape


Welwetschia Plains


The famous Welwetschia Plant


Uranium



Picnic in the Swapok River Valley

We camped that night at one of my favorite campsites we’ve stayed at in Namibia, called Bloedkoppie, which is Afrikaans for Blood Hill. The campsite was at this huge orangish/reddish hill, a granite inselberg. At sunset, the rock turns bright red. Of course, we all had to climb to the top of this rocky hill, which had amazing views. On the climb up, you see rock sculptures made from the erosion, which were quite beautiful. There were six campsites at Bloedkoppie, but it was only our group and a German couple in the whole place.


Bloedkoppie campsite from on top of the rock



Rock Sculpture


Ruby on top of BloedKoppie


Another view from on top of Bloedkoppie


We stopped by an old German fort on the way home



And climbed up another pass.


This whole trip I kept thinking, if this beautiful place was anywhere NEAR the United States, it would be overrun would tourists. Instead, we hardly saw a passing car the whole trip.

Busy

We are all busy in Namibia! It is getting close to our time to leave Windhoek in middle January, and I have been too busy to post about our activities lately. The girls have been busy with end of the year school activities, like performances and science fairs. The girls finish school today at WIS with each of them having a small good-bye party, and then we begin, what they call here, the “festive season”. Christmas is a big holiday here, and decorations began appearing here and there around Halloween.

Bill has finished up his teaching at UNAM (he taught two sections of a legal writing course this term), and is still tutoring a few folks at the American Cultural Center. I am still finishing up a number of projects at UNAM and with three NGOs, and now am getting stressed about all I wanted to get done before we leave! We have also stepped up our travelling, and have been out and about seeing Namibia on weekend trips quite often. I’ll update a bit in the next week, and try to post some photos.

US Elections in Namibia

We stayed up most of the night last night to watch the election results from our African vantage point. There has been a huge amount of interest in the United States election since we have arrived here in January. By far, the question I have been asked most often since I've been here was what I thought about the elections, particularly about Barack Obama, but also about Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin. The amount of details that people know about American politics is amazing. We were at a party last week, and one of our Zimbabwean friends said, “We must not forget about the Truman/Dewey election in 1948”. I thought that was so funny, as most people my age in the United States would not know what he was talking about, but other Africans at the party did!

Last night we went to an event at the American Cultural Centre about the U.S. elections, and they had the largest turnout that they had ever had at any event in Namibia. Many of the Ministers were there, including the Prime Minister, and the Secretaries of various departments. The Namibian mock vote at this party was 78 Obama, 2 McCain, and 2 for the write-in candidate, Hilary Clinton. There were some very interesting discussions about US and Namibian politics. We went home to nap for a few hours, and then woke up at 3 am to watch as the polls closed across the USA. When Obama was declared winner, along with getting goosebumps, we also got text messages and calls right away from Namibian friends who had also been up all night or woke up early in the morning to watch the returns. We had a small early morning party at our house with coffee and a few friends where we watched the concession speech and victory speech, and there was not a dry eye in the house during either speech (probably a mixture of staying up most of the night and the historic night).

After I finally made it to the office this morning, I have had a steady stream of well-wishers. It seems that most of Namibia was up at 4:00 am watching the returns as well as the Americans. To a person, Namibians are excited about Obama being president, and loved his victory speech and the general sense of hope Obama's win brings to people in Africa. Most have also commented on the honorable and gracious concession speech of John McCain, which was quite touching.

I am very, very proud to be an American today.

Halloween in Namibia

Halloween is not a holiday that is normally celebrated in Africa. But, as we are big Halloween fans, we made the most of it. The kids first went to a Halloween party at the U.S. Embassy, where they trick or treated in the offices. Even though the U.S. Embassy has not received any threats in Namibia, it is like a fortress! Even though I’ve been there a ton of times, I have to have a guard follow me around at all times when I’m in there. However, for Halloween they did let in a pirate (Ruby), a ninja (Alice) and Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt (Maxine). I also was allowed to bring a camera in, as I told the guards that it was a U.S. custom to take photos on Halloween (then after I went to all that trouble, I hardly took any photos). The kids also got to wear their costumes at their international school, which was experimenting with celebrating Halloween this year for I believe the first time. Finally, we had a Halloween party at our house. Our Namibian friends and friends from other parts of Africa were very curious about Halloween, and I think they had a good time at our party. I kept getting text messages before the party: “what is Halloween?” “why do you wear costumes?” “what do you do at a Halloween party?” They seem to like the concept of Halloween, and we had fun trying to explain the whole thing to them. We’ll have to leave them our meager decorations when we go. At the witching hour, the kids all took off their costumes and jumped in the pool.

Last day of lecturing

I taught my last class today to my second year students in Social Development (sophomores). The students have a week off for studying/reading, and then have a full three weeks of exams similar to the British model. I think I have finally figured out the whole examination thing, but it took me all year to do so. I still have to give exams, and I’m doing the final oral examinations for the 4th year students in a few weeks, so there’s still quite a bit to do here before the university closes for the end of the year.


A UNAM classroom


My co-teacher watching, as a group tries to get the right Jeopardy "question"


It was a bittersweet class for me today. I prepared a “Jeopardy” board and we did a review game with the students, which was quite fun. They all had team names, and it went down to Final Jeopardy bidding to see which team one. There was lots of cheering and revelry. I then had to say goodbye to this group, the class I had spent the most time with here in Namibia, teaching them 2 or 3 days a week both terms. They were very sweet to me, and gave me a big Namibian cheer, which is impossible for me to do, but involves a lot of screaming at a really high-pitched level. They also told me that they liked being able to debate in class and try out different views, which we did a lot of in this class together. I tried as much as possible to draw on what they already knew, so our class discussions would involve such topics as “what good is it to raise a chicken to maturity when you are starving today” to “how many feet away from a hut you need to dig a latrine”. I had very little to add to these conservations, but they often got heated, in a good way. I was pleased to hear that it seems that I was able to run classes in a way that was useful and interesting to most of the students, and led them to some critical thinking. I told the students today how much I learned from them, which I truly did. I'm a little sad that it is all over already. I feel lucky that I had the opportunity to teach some of the brightest and most committed young people in Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and the rest of Southern Africa.


My co-teacher and I with some students


Here I am with a bunch of students.

My social work school back home sent me a bunch of t-shirts, and I gave each of the students either a bag or t-shirt (and my business card), which they loved. I think there are a number of new University of Minnesota fans here in Africa now. It was a pleasure for me to see them around campus the rest of the day in their maroon and gold.